Kate Miriam Loewenthal

Kate Miriam Loewenthal read for her BSc and PhD at University College London, and built her career at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she became Professor of Psychology. For more than fifty years her research has centred on one question: how religious belief, practice and culture bear on the human mind, in sickness and in health.

She began, in the 1960s, in experimental psychology, with studies of language, codes and memory, and a long series of papers on handwriting, self-presentation and the judgements people form of one another. From the 1980s her attention turned to religion: how faith shapes coping, wellbeing and distress, and the mental health of religious communities, with particular depth in Anglo-Jewry and the strictly orthodox world.

In 1997 she founded Mental Health, Religion & Culture and edited it for more than twenty years, building it into a leading international journal. Kate's books, among them The Psychology of Religion: A Short Introduction (2000) and Religion, Culture and Mental Health (2007), carried her research to students and clinicians well beyond psychology.

Kate's work has been supported by extensive research funding and has taken her across Europe, Australia and the United States. She has advised health and social-care services on the needs of religious communities, spoken at conferences worldwide, and held or been affiliated with posts at Royal Holloway, Glyndŵr University, New York University in London and Heythrop College. In later work she returned to the clinic, on EMDR, trauma and religious change, in her most recent papers and her 2022 book, Trauma and Religious Faith.